It’s come to my attention that, in today’s column about the Obama Justice Department’s racially discriminatory enforcement of the civil rights laws, I misidentified Thomas Perez. He is the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. This is a very high ranking position, but it is not as high as Associate Attorney General, the position I errantly attributed to Mr. Perez. I confused Thomas Perez with Thomas Perrelli, who is actually the Associate Attorney General (i.e., the No. 3 post at DOJ).
In the column, I say:
A chain of communications finally pried from DOJ by Judicial Watch links Rosenbaum with even higher ranking political appointees. These include deputy associate attorney general Sam Hirsch (a former Obama campaign operative who has pushed for the race-based Balkanization of Hawaii); Hirsch’s boss, Thomas Perez, the associate attorney general (DOJ’s No. 3 official); and David Ogden, who was deputy attorney general (the No. 2 post at Justice) when the front office, contrary to its repeated claims, was deliberating over the Panthers case. Also almost certainly in the loop is Holder himself. Besides the fact that the Panthers controversy inside his department was something he’d naturally have been interested in and briefed on, the Judicial Watch disclosures indicate that talking points about the Panthers dismissal were prepared for the attorney general at some unspecified point.
(Emphasis added.) As Christian Adams documented, the chain of communications in question involved Mr. Perelli, not Mr. Perez. Indeed, Mr. Perez did not assume his position until October 2009, months after the communications in question took place. That, in fact, is one of the problems with DOJ’s having had Mr. Perez testify before the commission: Perez did not have direct knowledge of the pertinent facts about the Black Panthers case at the time they were occurring, although he surely knew what the Obama administration’s civil rights enforcement policy was and is.
UPDATED: Subsequently, I say, “[Christopher] Coates has also testified that he complained directly to the aforementioned Perez (the associate AG) about the Obama DOJ’s policy of racial animus in voting-rights enforcement.” As noted above, Thomas Perez, to whom Mr. Coates complained, is the assistant attorney general in charge of the civil rights division.
I regret these errors.